Tuesday, November 20, 2007

The Strong, Silent Type, by C. Kelly Robinson

This audiobook was obtained free from NetLibrary.com, was 11 hours and 28 minutes long, and was narrated by Ezra Knight and Lizzie Cooper Davis.

Deacon Davis is a former Pittsburgh Steeler and son of a late, great civil right leader. He is politically active as an organizer and speech writer, but he is also a stutterer. After a particularly bad performance on a TV interview, the organization he has been working for gives him the pink slip, and he is persuaded to take part in a speech therapy experiment that will take several weeks of intensive rehabilitation at a college facility.

Davis' life is already pretty complicated. He has a daughter by one woman who is the daughter of a crime syndicate kingpin. He has a son by another woman. That boy is 13 and in trouble at school for groping a female classmate. He also has a black sheep brother who has had cocaine issues. He is still investigating their father's death and is the last person on earth who still thinks it was murder. Add to this the speech therapist that Deacon has a sexual relationship with during his rehab, and this turns into a pretty depressing stereotype festival.

As a voyeuristic soap opera, it's worth 2 stars if you like that kind of thing.

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